Your Old iPad Deserves Better Than a Drawer
Somewhere in your house, there's an old iPad sitting in a drawer. Maybe the kids outgrew it. Maybe you upgraded and never got around to selling it. Maybe it's too slow for anything useful.
Here's the thing: it still has a perfectly good screen. And that screen could be showing you tomorrow's weather, tonight's dinner recipe, and whether your kid has soccer practice — all without anyone pulling out a phone.
That's what a kitchen display is. An old tablet, propped up or mounted on the wall, running a few simple apps that show the information your household actually checks twenty times a day.
No smart home system. No coding. No expensive hardware. Just an old device doing something useful again.
What We'll Cover in This Guide
This is a four-part series that walks you through the whole process:
- Why This Works (And What You Need) — What makes a kitchen display actually useful, which tablets work, and the few things you'll need to get started.
- Choosing and Setting Up the Apps — The best free and cheap apps for calendars, weather, recipes, and family lists — and how to set them up.
- Mounting It and Making It Look Good — Stands, mounts, and cable management that won't make your kitchen look like a tech lab.
- Keeping It Running — Battery care, screen settings, troubleshooting, and the handful of things that might trip you up.
Each part takes about 10 minutes to read and another 10-15 to actually do. You could have a working kitchen display by the end of this afternoon.
Who This Guide Is For
You don't need to be technical. If you can download an app and adjust a setting, you can do this.
That said, if you're the kind of person who likes the technical side — setting up custom dashboards, tweaking configurations, getting everything just right — we've got a more in-depth article about building a kitchen display from scratch that goes deep on custom setups, APIs, and code.
This guide is the "I want it working by dinner" version.